“I struck gold,” Ashwin Naidu thought when Melanie Culver, U.S. Geological Service Conservation Geneticist at the University of Arizona’s School of Natural Resources and the Environment, handed him a cardboard box of mountain lion poop and asked him to analyze it as part of his Master’s Degree requirements. Some would have been repulsed to open up and sort through 105 sealed baggies of sun-dried poop but not Naidu. On the contrary, he knew the wealth of knowledge that could be gleaned by processing “leave behinds,” or scat, as poop is technically known as in the conservation biology field. For more, click download button above!